John Pyros
John Pyros lives in Tarpon Springs.
He hosted a small press conference
Brew went to, right after he got on permanent with IBM. Brew met other small press
writers and publishers, and David Cussen, who had just moved down to Florida and
started up Pineapple Press, in Sarasota.
Pineapple Press has rejected several
of Brew's manuscripts, over the years.
He's not writing what they're looking
for.
He met Duane Locke, who was still teaching, at the University of Tampa,
then, and Carol Mahler, a poet who named herself after the composer, and who married
her professor, who taught at New College, or the University of South Florida. I
don't remember his name. But it wasn't Mahler.
Brew took Owen and Balder
with him. Brenda was out of town, teaching a class.
They stayed at a motel
across Spring Bayou from the Community Center where the conference was held. Owen
caught jack crevalle off the seawall using menhaden the jack had knocked over the
wall with their heads as live bait and smoked them at the motel on a disposable charcoal
grill.
They went to the first annual Seafood Festival at the sponge docks.
The jacaranda were in bloom.. What was it--May?
* * *
A couple of years later, John Pyros held a mail art conference.
Brew's
mother watched Owen and Balder and Brew and Brenda went over, by themselves, and
stayed in the same motel, the Gondolier, or Gondola. A red-dot place, which smelled
of curry.
They ate at Pappas's. A Greek restaurant that smelled of garlic.
Brenda's employer, Mitel, sold telephone switchboards to a lot of motels, owned by
Indians. Like the motel on Panama City Beach in Ruby in Paradise was owned
by Indians.
A couple staying at the motel, upstairs, were attending the conference.
The woman was cool towards Brew. He gave them a book he had written and she read
it that night, straight through. In the morning, she was warm, towards Brew.
She didn't bring him any cookies, though. Or try to fuck him.
She said he
corresponded with some of the A-list mail art people. She was impressed.
Brew said, after awhile, a winnowing process separates the wheat from the chaff.
* * *
A few years after that, John Pyros scheduled a reading for Brew at a chain
bookstore in a mall in Clearwater.
There was a cardboard figure of Shakespeare
outside with Brew's picture in the face, announcing the date and time. Public service
announcements had been read on the college radio stations.
Folding chairs
were set up in an alcove near the entrance, where anyone coming into, or leaving,
the bookstore would see Brew standing at a dais, behind a podium, reading.
People streamed by, looked in, kept going.
Brenda, John Pyros, and his fiancee
sat in the folding chairs.
After awhile Brew stopped reading to the empty
room.
In the bookstore proper, the two big pyramids of new books for sale
were the first Jane Fonda exercise book and a coffeetable book about Michael Jackson
commissioned by Jackie O, in her role as acquisitions editor at a publishing house.
Brew had seen the future and it sucked.
* * *
John Pyros wrote a book about William Wantling, a poet who wrote a book called
Seven on Style.
Bukowski tried to fuck Wantling's widow, Ruth, when
she was still in mourning.
Men are pigs.
Or are women Sirens, who
turn men into swine?
Read Women. Cecelia Keecing.
Maybe Brew
would read Women again.
Yesterday, he went to Books-A-Million, to
buy Pulp, and the only Bukowski title they had in the store was Women.
And it was under Poetry.
Richard Mathews
Konglomerati magazine accepted a story Brew wrote called "You Used
To Could Catch Snook in Downtown Delray Beach," and asked him to record himself
reading it, for their audio archive. They suggested he go to his local NPR affiliate,
who would donate studio time to record him.
Brew did and they turned him
down.
He was feuding with his local NPR affiliate.
He wrote a newspaper
column suggesting that they go over to an all-fund-drive format, then saying that
they had, playing only what music drew contributions at fund-drive time, and poor-mouthing
between musical selections, pitches to corporate underwriters, and messages from
corporate underwriters more frequently played than commercial stations played commercials.
Brew said they out-Heroded Herod, being completely commercial, in the sense preoccupied,
or obsessed, with money.
So Brew recorded himself reading it, in his eyrie,
on his Radio Shack stereo, with the FM radio playing a plea for money, from an NPR
fund-drive, in the background.
* * *
Another time, the Konglomerati Foundation invited Brew to come, and read
from work in progress. They paid him $100.
He had quit IBM by the time he
drove over to Gulfport, to read, but when they invited him, and paid him $100, he
still worked for IBM. He donated his emolument back to the Konglomerati Foundation,
and got IBM to match it 2 for 1, as a charitable contribution.
Brew made
his expenses selling Screed, after the reading.
Instead of reading,
Brew talked about what he was doing with his life, then answered questions.
What he was doing was he quit his day job, mortgaged his house, and was giving himself
an evil genius grant to write a book about growing up in Delray Beach, a book he
called Evil Genius.
The audience thought that was a damned fine thing
for a man to do with his life.
* * *
After the reading, Richard Mathews invited Brew over to his house to meet
local writers.
Mathews was a professor. His wife was a professor. Their
friends were professors.
They talked shop.
They talked about how
to win a grant, a fellowship, a writer-in-residence position, a literary prize.
These were all things Brew applied for and did not get.
It freaked Brew out
and he left.
A professor would give a friend a writer-in-residence position,
then the friend would give him one. Or his wife, or significant other. Or a prize,
or a grant. Or a student of theirs. A female student, a minority.
It isn't
easy being green.
You ought to try being a straight white male from the south,
of a certain age. With a chip on his shoulder. A whiner and an Alibi Ike, who thought
he was better than people more qualified than he.
* * *
Brew wrote about how the visit freaked him out, and put it in his book.
It was poor manners, to write about people who had invited you into their home, in
a less than positive way.
Brew sent Richard Mathews a copy of whatever book
he wrote, but he didn't hear back.
He feared he may have offended Mathews
and his wife. Lashing out in pain and fear, confusion, as William S. Burroughs said,
about his and Joan's William Tell act, "Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance
blew the shot."
Sterling Watson couldn't be there.
Watson had
written a roman-à-clef about his professor at Florida, Harry Crews. A debauched,
boozing manipulator of students, a selfish and destructive monster, an asshole.
Maybe he and Watson would have had something to talk about.